Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:5	Budget Low

Fred Olen Ray. There are certain names associated with the heights of movie making. Names that conjure up great moments in cinema history. Yeah, Fred's is not one of them.

The movie opens with a screen crawl (actually the crawl was too expensive, it is a still shot) that explains that a trip to Venus brought back strange life forms that could be used for good or evil. Then we cut to a laboratory or large closet (hard to tell) where a couple of scientists are hard at work. One ends up in a getting bitten by a BEM and turns into something like a zombie and then rips the arm off a local guy. After he is killed by a jeep, we get to watch Bobbie Breese have sex. Bobbie's lover heads off to make a film leaving her behind to wait for a script to arrive in the mail. The script that arrives is from the wrong company and for the wrong film and she feels it is beneath her to appear in such trash. Eventually she confronts the director of the film she wants only to be told in no uncertain terms that she is too old for the part. Devastated she injects herself with a drug left for her by the surviving scientist from the first scene. For a little while she is more young and attractive but soon she turns into a large insect-like monster and eats her secretary. The out of work writer working on her biography finds her shortly after she has chowed down on her boyfriend and his girlfriend. He holds her at gunpoint until the cops show up and shoot her. Unfortunately, he was bitten by the monster and just before the credits roll, something red and gooey pops out of his chest.

I will say this for Fred, he is persistent. Evil Spawn is the result of a mash up of three or four movies that were started and never finished. Originally there was a BEM from outer space movie, the scenes with John Carradine were from a project called Frankenstein's Brain, and to make matters worse footage was added later to create a movie called "The Monster Within" that had new scenes featuring Jay Richardson and Melissa Moore's chest. Fred managed to cobble together a VHS tape and two DVDs out of this mess.

Lest you think that I dislike Fred, you should know that he is one of my heroes. Seriously the man has spent his entire life making bad movies, hanging out with (and marrying) B movie queens, strippers and porn stars. Not to mention the occasional wrestler or two. Yes, his movies suck but I think his budgets would have made Roger Corman choke. If his movies are awful, at least Fred enjoys himself. In "Bad Girls from Mars", Fred wears a bandana on his face for most of a scene because he can't keep the smile off his face. Fred's later films are largely populated by porn stars and may look better than his older films, but tend to be less amusing.

Evil Spawn starts out with shots of a space ship returning to Earth from Venus bringing back something. We never really find out what. Apparently the only two scientists working on the project don't seem to be getting along. In fact, Evelyn (Dawn Wildsmith aka Fred's ex) manages to lock her coworker in a room with the BEM. After getting bitten by the little guy, the doc turns kinda zombie like and rips the arm off a kid. The victim's girlfriend then runs him over with a jeep and kills him. Evelyn then visits with Dr. Zietman (John Carradine) who babbles on about something that may be related to the plot and then dies. Evelyn smiles knowingly. Probably the two big plot points so far are that everyone pronounces Evelyn as "Evil Lyn" and that she has a lot of pictures of Lynn Roman (Bobbie Breese) on her wall. Soon, Evil Lyn shows up at the Roman estates and offers Lynn the chance of a lifetime. She shows her documentation that Dr. Zietman's formula works and vaguely mentions that it will make her younger and immortal without any side effects. Lynn's desire to continue to be an actress outweighs her concerns over the safety of the drug and she injects herself with it.

Now if this is sounding familiar to you, it is because this is the same premise as the two "The Wasp Woman" films. Both of these Roger Corman movies explore the problems of staying young and beautiful in a fickle profession. Evil Spawn was filmed in between the two movies, but Fred plays Tex in the 1995 version. In the original Wasp Woman, the title character is much more sympathetic than Breese's character here. Part of that could well be that Ms. Breese really cannot act. While she was believable in the shower scenes, pretty much any time dialogue was involved it was rather painful. But to be fair, Caradine's nearly incoherent rambling was probably the best acting in the movie, so Bobbie was not alone in the bad acting department. I have mentioned that currently Fred is using a lot of porn actors in his movies. It should be noted that this has not really lowered the quality of the acting in his films. Fred also uses a lot of Talking Head directing which significantly lowers the cost of a film while at the same time giving it a horrifically amateur look.

If you have a good tolerance for bad movies, you may enjoy this one. It really is so awful on so many levels that it can be appreciated as a true B movie. You do get to see John Carradine in his last film and Forest J. Ackerman as a pool boy. Pamela Gilbert spends a considerable amount of time nude, so it is not a complete waste of time. Fred himself introduces the movie as part of his Night Owl Theater DVD library. During the introduction he never talks about the movie beyond mentioning its name. That's my guy.

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